The Hsinchu Region, Like Silicon Valley, Thus Appears As an Exemplar Of
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This work is distributed as a Discussion Paper by the STANFORD INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMIC POLICY RESEARCH SIEPR Discussion Paper No. 00-44 Taiwan’s Hsinchu Region: Imitator and Partner for Silicon Valley AnnaLee Saxenian SIEPR and Univeristy of California, Berkeley June 16, 2001 Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 (650) 725-1874 The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University supports research bearing on economic and public policy issues. The SIEPR Discussion Paper Series reports on research and policy analysis conducted by researchers affiliated with the Institute. Working papers in this series reflect the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research or Stanford University. ____________ Taiwan's Hsinchu Region: Imitator and Partner for Silicon Valley AnnaLee Saxenian SIEPR and UC Berkeley [email protected] Revised Draft 7/16/01 Paper prepared for Conference on Silicon Valley and Its Imitators, Stanford Institute Economic Policy Research, July 28, 2000. Thanks to Wendy Li for first-rate research assistance during 1999-2000. Please do not circulate or cite. The global electronics industry was badly shaken when a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake hit Taiwan in September 1999. In Silicon Valley, the center of technology and product innovation for the industry there was widespread concern about lengthy interruptions in the supply of computers, semiconductors, and other key components. The concern was well founded: Taiwanese companies produce the majority of the world's notebook computers, motherboards, monitors, optical scanners, power supplies, and a range of other electronics-related products. In addition, the island's semiconductor foundries account for two-thirds of global foundry output. See Figures 1& 2. The impact of the earthquake was quite limited as most Taiwanese manufacturers returned quickly to pre-quake production levels. However the earthquake scare revealed the importance of this small island to the global information technology (IT) industry. As late as 1980, Taiwan served primarily as a source of low-cost labor for foreign consumer electronics corporations. In the following decades, indigenous producers of personal computers (PCs) and integrated circuits (ICs) emerged as key players in international production networks. By 1999 Taiwan ranked as the world's third largest producer of IT hardware, following only the US and Japan. See Figures 3 & 4.. Information technology production fuelled Taiwan's impressive economic growth in the last two decades. Taiwan's IT output grew from less than $100M in 1980 to over $5B in 1989 and grew over 20% annually in the 1990s (when GDP growth hovered around 6-7%) to reach $21B in 1999.1 High technology exports, which now account for close to half of the island's total exports, thus were the main force driving a more than 2 doubling of the GNP per capita income in just over a decade--from $6,333 in 1988 to $13,235 in 1999 (Taipei: MOEA, Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, Dec 2000, National Economic Trends.) How did this small, and until recently very poor, island of 24 million surpass other Asian economies as well as more advanced economies in the global technology competition? While Taiwan's initial advantage was its low cost labor, it is now recognized as a global center of electronic systems design, manufacturing, and logistics. Many observers claim that today Taiwan's manufacturing expertise has no parallel, even in the US. One indicator of Taiwan's technological achievements is its rapid mobility in international rankings of U.S. patent recipients: in 1980, Taiwan ranked 21, by 1990 it had reached 11, and in 1995 Taiwan ranked 7 (Taiwan National Science Council, 1995.) Today Taiwan receives substantially more patents per capita than the other Asian NICs (South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) and, along with Israel, ranks ahead of all of the G7 except the U.S. and Japan. (Trajtenberg, 1999.) See Figure 5. The dominant accounts of the Taiwanese postwar economic 'miracle' focus on the state's role in directing development in traditional industries such as chemicals, textiles, and electrical machinery (Wade, 1990.) Scholars attribute Taiwan's more recent successes in IT-related industries to activist government policy as well, focusing on the institutions of a 'developmental' state, such as the publicly funded research and development (R&D) agency, Industrial Technology and Research Institute, ITRI (Mathews, 1997.) This approach assimilates Taiwan's IT growth in the 1990s to that of Japan and Korea in the 1980s, overlooking how fundamental differences in the relationship between the state and the organization of production have shaped industrial performance. 1 If Taiwanese manufacturing in China is included, 1999 IT output was over $35B. 3 This paper argues that although the state played a very important role in the early development of Taiwan's IT sector, the region has more in common with Silicon Valley, Israel, and even with the nascent IT industries India and Ireland, than with the other East Asian NICs. The dynamism of Taiwan's IT industries, like those of Silicon Valley and its other 'imitators,' is rooted in the incremental deepening and broadening of the capabilities of a localized cluster of specialist producers as well as in its close economic ties to the original Silicon Valley. This differs fundamentally from the privileged relationship between the state and a handful of large, established corporate giants that characterized IT development in Japan and Korea in the 1980s. If the East Asian case is viewed as state-led development, then the experience of Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and its other 'imitators' is best understood as entrepreneurship-led growth.2 Taiwan's IT sector is dominated today by indigenous firms, m most of which were started in the past two decades. While Japanese and American electronics companies helped to develop a skill base and infrastructure in the 1960s and 1970s, and while foreign companies still have a presence in the industry, the central dynamic in the cluster's growth and upgrading has been provided by Taiwanese entrepreneurs and firms. The majority of these firms remain small by global standards, however some have grown to dominate important segments of world markets. Even as they grow large, however, they continue to collaborate (as well as compete) with other local specialists in a way that is reminiscent of the Silicon Valley economy. The following section of this essay examines the factors underlying the initial emergence of Taiwan's IT sector in the early 1980s: FDI and public investments in 2 An emphasis on entrepreneurship was explicit in Taiwanese policy from the beginning. The 1961-64 plan, for example, states that "It is true that Taiwan is short of capital, but 4 education and research capabilities initially, and later, policies to develop and transfer technology to the private sector and to support new industrial entrants, combined with growing ties to the Overseas Chinese community in Silicon Valley. The third section provides an overview of the organization of production in the Taiwan's IT sector today and examines the historical evolution of the PC and IC industries since 1980. The fourth section explores how industrial decentralization and close ties to Silicon Valley contribute to the cluster's capacity for adaptation and innovation. A final section addresses the challenges that Taiwan faces to further industrial upgrading and speculates about its relationship to Mainland China. The Emergence of Taiwan's IT Sector The origins of an indigenous IT industry in Taiwan date to the emergence in the early 1980s of two separate clusters of entrepreneurship. Dozens of small firms and start- ups in the Taipei area began cloning PCs and components, building on the skills and infrastructure created by consumer electronics-related MNCs in earlier decades. At about the same time, a handful of IC manufacturing and design start-ups were spun-out of the government funded semiconductor research institute, the Electronics Research and Service Organization (ERSO) in the Hsinchu Science Park. These two nascent clusters built on the infrastructure and skill base created by two decades of public investments in education, as well as by FDI from the US and Japan. A couple dozen multinationals located plants in Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s to exploit its cheap low skilled workforce and the generous incentives of its export processing zone for manufacturing of labor intensive consumer electronics such as TVs, VCRs, and what is wanted most is entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurship." (Wade, 1990: 88) 5 calculators as well as for semiconductor packaging and testing. This era of FDI in electronics was critical to the development of the PC industry, in particular, because the MNCS had created a pool of manufacturing skill, basic management and marketing capabilities, and a local infrastructure of materials and parts suppliers. A majority of Taiwan's political leaders in the 1960s and 1970s were technocrats with held graduate degrees in engineering-related fields from universities in the US or Japan. They had thus been exposed to the world's largest and fastest growing economies. Motivated by the desire to establish domestic economic strength--in large part to compensate for the island's political isolation--these policymakers developed programs and institutions to develop Taiwan's technological capabilities. They focused initially on improving the skill-base and technical infrastructure in what was still a very poor country: Taiwan's GNP per capita in 1962 was US $170, on par with Zaire and the Congo (Wade, 1990.) These policymakers began by making substantial investments in technical education and in upgrading the capabilities of public research institutions. The annual number of graduates of higher education grew from under 10,000 in 1961 to almost 200,000 in 1996--and 40% of these degrees were in engineering.